For me, the beauty of PM3.HD has always been the fanart view modes. Some time ago i was thinking, why not display the fanart fullscreen instead of on just a part of it.
After modifying some xml files, the result turned out so well i got the idea of doing the same for the other view modes as well.
And before i knew it, i was doing an almost complete redesign of the PM3.HD skin.

I've removed as much textures as possible to create more room for fanart and replaced the rest of the textures with transparent ones, to give it a clean look and again...to show more of the fanart.

Most of these mods can be disabled / enabled through the skin settings, in fact the Home Menu is fully customizable, you can add or remove every item there.

A few more tweaks i've implemented along the way:- Fanart in Filemode
- Fanart for Games
- 3D Coverflow view for Artists and Songs
- Fanart view for Songs
- Icon view for Albums (similar to DVD Thumb view)
- Moved System Info to the Settings section instead of Shutdown Menu
- Replaced the weird 'octopus-like' OSD with a regular Dialog Menu
- Fully hide the Left Menu on all pages, it slides in when needed

Download:
So finally, a download link. Everything mentioned above is included (weather fanart package, media flags, genre icons, etc..) and enabled by default,
so it should work right out of the box. Get Transparency!: here.

Thanx to: Jezz_X for the great PM3.HD skin and everyone who's contributing to XBMC by coding, scripting, designing or just by posting new ideas.
Extra Special Thanx to: dynamix - for hosting Transparency!

I have to say, just from the screens, it looks nice, and I'm sure many will appreciate the mods that you've included. And music fanart at the song level, nice. Looks promising, I'll have to give it a try.

This is an amazing skin! I am not sure if the is a feature of the new XBMC build but the scrolling through movies/tv shows is extremely smooth. Run amazing on AppleTV. There use to be a delay when scrolling in library mode, especially with fan art enabled.

dynamix Wrote:I've noticed this mod isn't compatible for the xbox platform as i get corrupted textures. When using it on windows all seems well.

Would love to use it on the xbox, as i think this will run very smooth on the old machine. Any ideas to get it to work?

I'm getting this as well.
Extracted the textures and then compressed them again.
Less errors but still can't load a movie or TV section without corruption though home screen and settings work better after recompressing.

This mod is excellent and get's high rating's in the all important wife acceptance factor.

I have one problem concerning fan art in file mode though.

In my TV directory I use the scrapper to get the show info, fanart, and banners and it works beautifully. My problem is in the movies directory where I use media companion to gather the info, it does not show the fanart. If I browse for it, it shows the current fanart being used as the correct one and I can navigate to the appropriate folder and choose it manually, but it won't show up for some reason.

Any ideas on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated as this looks like my new skin of choice.

And thanks for the awesome work!
treefour

edit: Actually I am getting the fanart in the movies directory but it is only showing up once in side the folder. It looks linked to the video file rather than the folder. (I must be doing something wrong I just can't figure it out, sorry).

I love the transparent look and I feel just like you when the only views I like are focused on fanart. I noticed you used the background="true" and I did see a difference on my htpc.

A few things I noticed were a small glitch in the fanart for songs. I am guessing it is because it is often loading the same image mulitiple times for artists with several songs. This is the reason I haven't been using it myself. Any suggestion on a solution, because I think it is a great feature.

I also noticed from your screenshots you had the tv network on the episode level, but it did not show for me when I tried it out. I wasn't aware it was available beyond the tv show lever....can you confirm? Or is it set to be visible based off of another factor such as 720p will show ABC HD?

Thanks again for the great skin and your inspiration to keep thinsg going.

dynamix Wrote:I've noticed this mod isn't compatible for the xbox platform as i get corrupted textures. When using it on windows all seems well.

Would love to use it on the xbox, as i think this will run very smooth on the old machine. Any ideas to get it to work?

I'm sorry, but since i don't have an XBOX it would be pretty difficult for me to come up with a fix. I hope someone will figure out the problem.
I've read in some other thread the XBOX has problems with several HD skins because of the limited amount of memory available.

nuzecast Wrote:I'm getting this as well.
Extracted the textures and then compressed them again.
Less errors but still can't load a movie or TV section without corruption though home screen and settings work better after recompressing.

Nice, at least that's a start. Maybe replacing all the default backgrounds with low res ones would make things better ? Just a wild guess.

ekim232 Wrote:A few things I noticed were a small glitch in the fanart for songs. I am guessing it is because it is often loading the same image mulitiple times for artists with several songs. This is the reason I haven't been using it myself.

That's correct, showing fanart for songs (and when browsing the library by albums) is not supported by XBMC, so i just used a 'hack' to read fanart image directly from the harddisk instead of using the cached ones.
Since loading the fanart from the harddisk will take some time, the default background image will show for a small amount of time when the fanart transitions from one image to the other.

Guess i'll make a feature request on trac for proper fanart support for songs (and albums).

btw. the same will happen when you browse your music collection in file mode.

Quote:I also noticed from your screenshots you had the tv network on the episode level, but it did not show for me when I tried it out. I wasn't aware it was available beyond the tv show lever....can you confirm? Or is it set to be visible based off of another factor such as 720p will show ABC HD?

Network flags are available at episode level (assuming you're using MIP to store the network info in the <director> field of the episode .nfo files). The HD network flags will indeed only show if 720p or 1080p info is available: